''Straight to Hell,'' the new Alex Cox movie, is no ''Repo Man.'' It's not
much of anything, actually. Mostly, it's a cast and a crew waiting around
in Spain for a movie to happen around them. It began when Cox had eight
months to kill before shooting began on his new movie, ''Walker.'' He and
a bunch of mostly musician friends went to Spain and made what they hoped
would be a punk spaghetti Western, on Sergio Leone's favorite set. But nothing
in the film is as much fun as what one imagines its late-night beer-driven
planning sessions must have been like. Although ''Straight to Hell'' takes
its title from a song by The Clash, it suggests ''A Fistful of Nothingness''
or ''The Good, the Bad and the Empty.''
Part of Cox's problem here is that punk -- with whose anarchistic politics
his sympathies and sensibilities lie -- has been dead for some time, deader
even than Sid Vicious and Nancy Spungen, the subjects of his last punkerdammerung,
''Sid and Nancy.'' Try as he will, Cox just can't revive punk's defiant
whoop here. One wonders if it would have been possible even if ''Straight
to Hell'' had a script, which it doesn't. Mostly, it's Cox's friends hanging
out, looking forlorn, as if they wished someone would tell them what to
do. They includes Joe Strummer, of the defunct Clash, Dick Rude, who wrote
the script, and Sy Richardson, who projects a nice quality of centered watchfulness,
even though he has nothing to attach it to on this occasion.
These three bumbling desperados bungle a contract hit, rob a bank, then
head into the desert, where their Honda breaks down. In no time, they're
striding down the dusty main street of Sergio Leone land -- a parched theme
park of the would-be mythic. Their moll (she's pregnant with the Richardson
character's child) is pouty Courtney Love, who suggests a cross between
Nancy Spungen and the Divine character in ''Lust in the Dust.'' Cox avoided
the tedious process of casting the members of the rival gang singly by simply
casting the entire London-based Irish band known as The Pogues as the McMahon
clan. ''Are you McMahon or McMice? Get the long coats,'' their patriarch
bellows. For the McMahons, La Vida, various painted signs keep reminding
us, is worth Nada.
The Pogues are endearingly good-natured, and more than willing in a landscape
where the big drink is coffee and everyone is strung out on it. The butler
who keeps pouring it from a silver service is Elvis Costello. Another genre
reversal joke is that ''heck'' and ''darn'' are as strong as the language
gets. One of the sight gags is Grace Jones's hair -- a long, curly wig --
in a bimbo role. In the film, she's an accessory to arms dealer Dennis Hopper,
whose name is the same as the German industrial giant, I.G. Farben. Filmmaker
Jim Jarmusch appears in yet another hip celebrity cameo, as the irate Mr.
Big. But, like everything else in the film, these cameos don't count for
much, unless you count the likelihood that their marquee value helped raise
the money to produce it in the first place. ''Straight to Hell'' looks like
yet another amateurish home movie where the real fun, you suspect, was to
be found off camera.